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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46668
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46668
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I would add one word to that (then I'll tell you why):

> Visa squared his shoulders, knowing Reino respected confidence.

An opinion is part of somebody's internal life; and how they see the world.

Without the word 'knowing', it is the _narrator_ telling us something about _Reino's_ internal life, and we have to guess that Visa knows this.

By adding the word 'knowing', the narrator is telling us something about _Visa's_ internal life and _why_ he is squaring his shoulders, because he believes something about Reino. (and I am presuming from the context that Visa is the POV character.)

In writing it is okay for the narrator to reveal inner thoughts of the POV character for a given scene, that can be done as direct thoughts (in italics), or direct dialogue with other characters, or indirectly in prose as a _description_ of thoughts that isn't in a verbatim thought-by-thought form. Or a mix of the two, for example:

> Britney walked half an hour, thinking over her conversation with Tomason, and near the first mile marker she realized something: Tomason was not lying to protect himself, it was to protect Jack! All the lies protected Jack. she stopped walking. _Why would he protect Jack?_

If you are talking about somebody's opinion, be sure to attribute it to them.

This can be in thoughts, but remember (for the sake of realism) that most opinions are not reviewed in detail by the people that hold them, and are almost never reasoned out in thoughts, they come in snippets as they apply to a situation. Again, as above, the reason Visa squares his shoulders is he believes it will help to show confidence. We don't need to learn why he believes this and who taught him that and when and where and how many times he has used it, or what happened to make him believe that Reino respects it -- We just need to know this is a belief he holds or something he knows.

Original score: 10